> What is the difference between an RIA desktop application (e.g. in Flex) and > a standard desktop application (e.g. Swing based) ? A RIA is an application with as primary goal (well, second to primary: working should always be the first goal) the user-experience. RIA-development is all about making the interface comfortable, make your user enjoy the use of it.
As for our company, it often starts out as a project with a 'standard' UI. Which goes up to the UI-testers, and they provide, together with one of our designers, a list of GUI-requirements. Once in a while this requires adding some new services to the back-end, but mostly it doesn't. There is NO difference in the functionality of an app, RIA or not. It 'just' is about making the user leaving the application with a nice feeling. > It has no reason to be a web-app so we will rather go for a desktop > application. (Or make it a web-app and lock the browser to benefit from all the web technologies (e.g. RSS feeds, thin client) Does that makes sense ?) If you are thinking about this, AIR might be worth looking at. I have no personal experience with this, but it should be an extension/wrapper for FlexApplications, adding support for communicating with the OS. Do keep in mind that AIR is not yet supported on anything but Windows/Mac. --Johan --- In [email protected], debussy007 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Thank you johan. > > The back ends are based on Java webservices. > It has no reason to be a web-app so we will rather go for a desktop > application. (Or make it a web-app and lock the browser to benefit from all > the web technologies (e.g. RSS feeds, thin client) Does that makes sense ?) > But there is something I don't get: > > What is the difference between an RIA desktop application (e.g. in Flex) and > a standard desktop application (e.g. Swing based) ? > > Thank you. >
